Last year, Time magazine took a deep breath and bravely declared us lot its collective Person of the Year, for filling YouTube with video clips and organising our social lives through FaceBook. With this year's nominations now upon us, it's refreshing to see an epigeneticist among the contenders.

The honour goes to Randy Jirtle, whose lab has given us some truly exciting insights into how gene expression is turned up or down by environmental factors. What these findings will mean for our understanding of diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative conditions will hopefully become clearer soon, now the US National Institutes of Health is setting up a huge effort to investigate.

The nomination comes from Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and famously one of Leon Trotsky's great granddaughters.

It's worth a mention that the Wellcome Trust's Sanger Institute in Cambridge launched a pilot study for a Human Epigenome Project back in 2003, but quit after mapping the methylation of chromosome six.

But back to Time magazine - are there any scientists you would like to see nominated as Person of the Year? I'm wondering if Dawkins would get many votes, or has his brand of angry atheism become too divisive for some?